The collision of the bus and the S.U.V. had been big, even by Los Angeles eye-in-the-sky standards. Desmond Shaw was stunned by its force.
Mr. Shaw, a veteran helicopter reporter in a sprawling city that has long looked to the air for news, had gazed at the wreck from above, transfixed. His aircraft was one in a swarm of choppers hovering high over the San Fernando Valley on Tuesday. The transit vehicle had been bashed like a toy, the S.U.V. jammed into its midsection. Authorities were saying at least two people were dead and many more were injured or trapped.
Mr. Shaw, a 45-year-old who works for a CBS affiliate, was back at work less than a week after taking a family leave prompted by the deaths of both parents, and he had been thinking lately about mortality. The crash was eerie for him, and he was glad to be done with the story.
But as he and his pilot were flying away, the newsroom called back: An aircraft appeared to have gone down nearby.
He thought of his fellow reporters aloft — colleagues for whom the air was their office.
“As soon as we got there and saw the fireball and the rotor blades, we knew what it was,” he said, speaking in an interview from his car early Wednesday. “It was the day we all dread.”
The back-to-back bus and helicopter crashes killed five people and strewed blackened wreckage in the Chatsworth neighborhood of Los Angeles. The bus crash happened shortly after 5 p.m. when the S.U.V. broadsided a Los Angeles Metro bus, killing at least two people and critically injuring others.
Then, around 7 p.m., a helicopter reporting for a local NBC affiliate plummeted to the ground and burst into flames. The reporter, Eliana Moreno, and the pilot, George Marciniw, were killed, along with a person on the ground.
The helicopter was just one of a fleet that zips over Southern California’s vastness, tracking events like car chases and wildfires, most of them supplied by contractors who provide aircraft and reporters to news stations.
The choppers, swashbuckling and loud, are a signature of the region, indispensable in a metropolis encompassing thousands of square miles. The crash on Tuesday night of an aircraft attempting to cover a spectacular collision, however, underscored another aspect of Los Angeles’s aerial news culture: the risks.
Helicopter crews across the United States say they must remain on constant lookout for hazards such as drones and bird strikes, as well as pilot error and mechanical failure. Although driving on freeways is statistically more dangerous than air travel, the crash of a tourist chopper in the Hudson River last year and the 2020 accident that killed the N.B.A. legend Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter and seven others have highlighted the long odds of surviving a helicopter accident.
At least eight fatal crashes involving news helicopters have occurred in the United States since 2000, killing 16 people, federal accident records and news accounts show.
In Los Angeles, two people were seriously injured in 2000 when a news helicopter covering the Academy Awards crashed at Van Nuys Airport.
At NBC4, formally known as KNBC, Tuesday’s tragedy summoned the memory of the 1977 helicopter crash that killed the KNBC correspondent Francis Gary Powers. A reconnaissance plane pilot, Mr. Powers had survived being shot down over the Soviet Union during the Cold War only to perish on his way back from covering a wildfire.
In the interview, Mr. Shaw said that helicopter journalists have to put aside their fears.
“You have to push it to the back of your brain or you can’t do the job,” he said. “I had a fear of heights when I was a kid. Now I’m sometimes up 10,000 feet high.”
Mr. Shaw has worked in broadcasting since his college days at California State University, Northridge, where he was news anchor for the campus radio station. He later became that most specific of Los Angeles media figures: a radio traffic reporter. For more than a decade, he flew above the freeways, keeping motorists apprised of hazards, from “gawker’s block” to jackknifed big rigs, as well as the occasional disaster or wildfire.
He joined CBS LA in 2015, and has been a full-time reporter and cameraman there for six years. He said he was well acquainted with Ms. Moreno and Mr. Marciniw.
“We knew pretty quickly who it was,” he said. “It’s a pretty tight knit community. There are probably a dozen of us, or maybe less, who report on air and run the camera.”
NBC4 said on Tuesday that its NewsChopper4 had been operated by a team from a Los Angeles-based vendor, Angel City Air. Mr. Shaw had run into them at airports over the years as they covered breaking stories, he said, and knew their voices by heart from broadcasts. So did the other reporters hovering overhead when the crash happened, and who have since heard the audio clips circulating on social media that are said to be their last communications.
“Heartbreaking doesn’t begin to describe it,” he said.
Mr. Shaw and his pilot didn’t see the crash, only the devastation on the ground in Chatsworth. The hours since have been a blur, he said: speaking on the air with his station’s news anchors and reassuring his loved ones that he was all right.
He took time in his car for one last interview before going home to greet his dogs, Lonzo and Scruffy, and hug his husband, Brandon. His phone, he said, had been sounding off all night with messages of concern and condolence.
“Everyone is asking if I’m OK,” he said. “Honestly? No. But I’m alive.”
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